like the soul of an Aeolian harp? I do assure you,
there is nothing in the world so like the voice of a spirit. Thomson had
an ear sometimes; he was not deaf to this, and has described it
gloriously, but given it another, different turn, and of more horror. I
cannot repeat the lines: it is in his 'Winter.'" The lines that Gray had
in mind were probably these (191-94):

"Then, too, they say, through all the burdened air,
Long groans are heard, shrill sounds and distant sighs
That, uttered by the demon of the night,
Warn the devoted wretch of woe and death."

Thomson appears to have been a sweet-tempered, indolent man, constant in
friendship and much loved by his friends. He had a little house and
grounds in Kew Lane where he used to compose poetry on autumn nights and
loved to listen to the nightingales in Richmond Garden; and where, sang
Collins, in his ode on the poet's death (1748),

"Remembrance oft shall haunt the shore,
When Thames in summer wreaths is drest,
And oft suspend the dashing oar
To bid his gentle spirit rest."

Collins had been attracted to Richmond by Thomson's residence there, and
forsook the neighborhood after his friend's death.

Joseph Warton, in his "Essay on Pope" (1756), testified that "The
Seasons" had been "very instrumental in diffusing a taste for the
beauties of nature and landscape." One evidence of this diffused taste
was the rise of the new or natural school of landscape gardening. This
was a purely English art, and Gray, writing in 1763,[27] says "It is not
forty years since the art was born among us; and it is sure that there
was nothing in Europe like it": he adds that "our skill in gardening and
laying out grounds" is "the only taste we can call our own, the only
proof of our original talent in matter of pleasure." "Neither Italy nor
France have ever had the least notion of it, nor yet do at all comprehend
it, when they see it."[28] Gray's "not forty years" carries us back with
sufficient precision to the date of "The Seasons" (1726-30), and it is
not perhaps giving undue credit to Thomson, to acknowledge him as, in a
great measure, the father of the national school of landscape gardening.
That this has always been recognized upon the Continent as an art of
English invention, is evidenced by the names _Englische Garten_, _jardin
Anglais_, still given in Germany and France to pleasure grounds laid out
in the natural taste.[29] Schop